


If you don't know me by now

by AuntyA



Category: Captain America - All Media Types
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-02
Updated: 2018-03-02
Packaged: 2019-03-26 03:56:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13849575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AuntyA/pseuds/AuntyA
Summary: Steve's DD4 enlistment form resurfaces after all those years and makes him think a little.





	If you don't know me by now

Steve leaned against the wall with a sigh and a thud, sagging slightly in the face of the assault from the tiny redheaded woman in front of him.

“Steve! You can’t have seen this before? How could you have? It was completed decades after you enlisted. They blacked out your name but your serial number is here.” The Widow wildly shook the papers in her hands at him.

“Yep. 54985870. Right there it looks like.“ He squinted trying to focus on the waving paper in front of him.

She was holding what looked to be pages of a printed light blue US Army enlistment form, redacted black rectangles scattered across it but visibly signed by someone in a florid scrawl in blue ink.

“But this isn’t your signature.” She shoved it dangerously close to Steve’s face.

Steve sighed again. And repeated his “Yep.” He shut his eyes and took a breath through his nose, like they had taught him to quash the anxiety. He opened his eyes again and looked down at her. He answered the unspoken question her eyebrows were asking. “Though not my signature. Brock told me my records had been destroyed after 70 years and I had to have a file. But because they weren’t sure what was going on or who I might actually be,  so the army didn’t allow me to sign anything after…and I don’t have any paperwork after the…” he trailed off.

“Post defrost?” She held the form up again and then stabbed at it with her finger. “Here, in Section 10 A. Eight years. You only signed up for eight years. And you, you already did your eight years. Steve, they have to let you out. You were totally on active duty that entire time. They are fucking liars. Brock isn’t it?”

Steve held up his hands in a placating but useless gesture. “They said it was still a war. Then President Ellis wouldn’t sign anything. He just gave me a thumbs up and took a selfie for his Instagram or some dang thing. Later someone told me about Section 9. Part c. About the stop loss they called it. He wouldn’t end my enlistment. Only he can. But the President likes me to be here.”

“You weren’t in the Marines. Plain old Army. They can’t just keep you.” She was getting huffy. “You can just walk away though.”

  
“I can’t Natasha, that’s deserting.” Steve exhaled through his nose and then looked down at her. She had that look in her eye. She shoved the forms at him, catching him in the chest and then let go. He grabbed at them with both hands before they fell to the floor.

Now he was talking to her back as she walked away down the hallway. “They explained it. It’s in Section 9 B on that form, Natasha. Laws and regulations that may change without notice to me. They just figured I’d keep showing up. I got a mission with Brock in four days.”

“You are such a child. I’ll send you something. Stay away from Brock for a bit.” He heard her frustrated growl as she walked away from him. “Gah.”

He couldn’t help himself from checking out her ass, she certainly was a bombshell in more ways than one. He knew that she wouldn’t drop it, she’d pester him, HQ, the President, anyone, everyone. He clutched the forms tighter as she turned and disappeared from view.

Before he even got back to his desk, his cell was already buzzing. He sat down and flattened the crumpled papers against the desktop. The form itself was from 2001 but dated in 2011 if the handwriting in section D was to be believed. His name had been printed on the line but then redacted half-assedly. Steve could see the ‘Steven Grant Rogers’ right through the black ink. He ignored the ringing cell phone for the moment.

The Service Representative who “witnessed” his signature was, surprisingly, not redacted. When he read the name he laughed.  Nick Fury. Same blue pen, same curly signature. What a fucker. He had even completed the oath. So help me God.

There was a small colour headshot, passport size, stapled on the form. It was a photo of what seemed to be a recently defrosted and bewildered him looking right past the photographer. His mouth in the photo slightly open. Steve could hear himself saying “What? What?”. That memory wasn’t that distant. His phone started to buzz on the desk again.

Steve reached across for a yellow pencil from the cup by the old timey goose neck lamp someone had found for him. He wasn’t used to the fluorescents and he didn’t rank a window.

He made little check marks on the sections of the form that he remembered from the first round back in 1941. After the 4F rejection and when he had finally gotten himself into the spindly squad. He wondered where the rest of his real enlisted file was. If it was a paper thing or just some bytes on a computer disk somewhere.

When he had sat for a security screening for his Shield Level 6 clearance, the Security Officer had laughed at his birthdate and joked that it was truly the easiest screen she’d ever done. Everyone was dead. He’d never travelled anywhere without the US Army. He had had only one address, that Brooklyn apartment. No finances. No bank account. No school transcripts. No driver’s license.

When he got the Level 8 clearance he had half expected to have his brain connected to some machine for screening but they just had him sign a waiver form. All his information already belonged to the Army.

Could Natasha even find a file? How long would that take for her to break into some dusty records storage place in Maryland and get back? And how would they know who had screwed around with it if it was missing anything. Could he request it from HR? Karim had mentioned something about Freedom of Information requests you could pay $15 for and the government had to look for whatever you asked them for.

He chewed a little on the metal end of the pencil. He had made that guy in the mailroom order him yellow HB pencils made of wood. There was only so much they could expect a guy to take.

Just like the old days, he would snap off the shitty pink eraser before he even sharpened it. Then he worked on it, gnawing slowly on the one end. It helped him think.

His phone was buzzing almost constantly at this point. Thumping on the desk by his wrist on the desk blotter. That was another special order office supply for him. He used a fountain pen. He needed a blotter. Not just some giant calendar in the shape of a blotter. Luckily he had cheap tastes in stationery supplies or they probably wouldn’t have given in.

He flipped his phone over and glanced at the most recent text. He saw that Natasha had sent him an email with  “NPRC-MPR” in the subject line and an attachment.

The attachment was his military personnel record. Incredibly Natasha had found it in the time it took him to walk down the hall, up a flight of stairs and sit down at his desk.

She had sent another text while he was scrolling through the pages. Three heart emojis and then a poop emoji. He rolled his eyes. He never guessed right with her. Perhaps that was why she still was looking out for him as if he was her little brother.

He checked his laptop and marvelled at the long list of emails he’d received in the last hour. Most were in red. All marked high priority.

Some from various handlers trying to figure out why he had left that meeting. Why he wasn’t responding to their calls. Would he be providing the brief he had been tasked with. Was he going to move out on the mission as approved. Where was he at the moment. Who had approved his team selection. Where was the mission brief for review. Did he had approval for not submitting his weapons listings. What was he doing exactly.

What was he doing exactly was a question he wasn’t sure he knew the answer to. That guy on the YouTube had talked about something he had never heard of before: stop loss. About how the army held soldiers hostage. Extending tours without consent. Involuntary extensions that in effect had become an illegal draft.

Shield had told him to look at television and YouTube to see what the world was like today. But because he was completely put off by the television YouTube drew him in. So much music, he had found that he was fascinated by all things Motown. Decades of Soul Train episodes. Ladies with gravity defying hairdos hypnotically swivelling their hips and clapping. Handsome men in sharp suits and those low low voices. That horny sexy baseline.

Those endless playlists that carried him through his days and weeks at HQ, running, at the gym and alone at home. He didn’t care, the government paid his data.

In his search for finding all the soul music he could online, he had stumbled across the videos of real people talking earnestly into their laptop cameras.  His therapist, the ninth one, had approved of him looking for soldiers online talking about their experiences when deployed since he flat out refused to go to any type of group therapy.  “It would give you context’” She had kept repeating the words ‘context’ and ‘grounding’ like a mantra but it didn’t do anything for him.

Steve didn’t find any context. In fact he had no idea what she was talking about in terms of context. He was currently on therapist fifteen, but seeing the men and women who had served in the military on the screen did give him some comfort.

Sometimes they would record in their houses. He found he didn’t have to look at their faces as he listened to them talk about what happened to them and what they had done to others. He stared at the surroundings of their lives, the couches with sleeping dogs, the counters filled with stacks of mail, bananas and cookie boxes. The clocks ticking away showing 3 o’clock in the morning. The calendars marked with children’s activities. The tables crowded with prescription pill bottles or red solo cups. He searched each video for something familiar, anything that reflected his own experiences back to him.

He didn’t find that in any of the videos. But Steve found himself completely transfixed by the videos the soldiers made in their cars. It seemed to just burst out of them. A burning need to record and post their experiences before they even could get home to a desk or to their living room computer. Steve would always look at their faces.

Steve had spent hours nightly, since he can’t sleep anymore ever, reading everything about the 120,000 soldiers who had their service extended against their will. He hadn’t talked to anyone about it but Natasha. They had been coming back from some fruitless mission and completely jetlagged and overtired he had naively asked her if the modern army had changed service requirements.

She had lost her shit on him.

Now she wouldn’t let it go.

With Harold Melvin and the Bluenotes playing in his earphones, he gnawed on his pencil and thought about next steps. Therapist number five had always harped on next steps. Playing on Steve’s tactical skills and planning, he had tried to get Steve to think about the future “even if it is just the future that awaits you tomorrow afternoon.” Steve frowned a little.

“Hey Capt! I got your coffee.”

Steve turned and saw a guy with a little coffee pot in a sweater standing at his cubicle door. He pulled out his earbud. “Hey Karim, thanks buddy.”

Karim was a Shield analyst who worked in the cube next to him. He sounded just like an American. Steve had tried to understand Karim’s background but he got lost in the story of parents being refugees from Uganda and the immigration to the US and now here he was a US citizen born in the US but looking like an Indian, like from India but his family was from Africa, but none of them lived there anymore.

None of these small confusions slowed Karim down. He was hell bent on being Steve’s best work friend. Karim brought Steve a coffee in a little glass press pot every day. The walls of the cubicles were low. Early on he had figured out that Steve didn’t much like the coffee in the office when he had caught Steve staring sadly into his coffee mug day after day.

Karim told him that his own Grandfather had always talked about coffee in a little press he had enjoyed at home in Kampala so maybe Steve would like to try it. Natasha didn’t like it. She said it tasted like dirt. Steve thought it tasted just like percolator coffee. She had agreed and spat it out.

Karim had a background in statistics and something to do with what he described as health promotion. How any of that connected with the military strikes Steve planned and executed was above Steve’s pay grade. Steve had no idea what he did exactly but he was in high demand for meetings. They would have their little coffee party and then he’d normally disappear.

Today though Karim looked thoughtfully at the papers on Steve’s desk. “So, you getting discharged or something? They going to bridge you out to retirement?”

Steve fiddled with the knitted cosy on the coffee press. “Not sure.”

“Okay man. Ciao!” Karim gave a little wave and disappeared to his own desk.

Steve pressed down the plunger on the little pot and swiped out the inside of the mug on his desk with a handkerchief. He poured a cup and then sat at his desk drinking black coffee and stacking and unstacking his yellow pencils into a triangle log cabin thing while he thought about that enlistment form and what it might all mean in the larger picture. He put his earbuds back in and flicked a pencil with a finger to watch it spin.

The Bluenotes sang in his ear, “If you don't know me by now, You will never never never know me.”

He had enlisted. He had in fact thrown himself at the draft in repeated attempts to sneak into the army. The reality of that time was that there was the draft and every able-bodied man in America responded. Even the crippled and the wrecked tried to join too.

The only reason he himself had been able to join the army at all was because he volunteered for the spindly squad and they finally took him. They took him only because it didn’t matter if the serum worked or not. He was entirely disposable.

Luckily for him the serum took. Instant super soldier. And now spec ops and strategy in addition to enhanced biology as they liked to call it nowadays.

So now that there was no actual formal declared war and he had more than served his eight years, so why couldn’t he retire from the army? Shadow wars weren’t enough. There was no draft now. And he didn’t have the same black and white thinking as he did in the 40s.

His desk phone rang sharply. He checked the call display, saying a silent thank you to Karim for showing him that trick. He waited until it went to voicemail.

He heard a cough behind him. A man was holding a cell phone and nodding at the phone on Steve’s desk, now blinking with a message. “I left you a message Grandpa.”

Steve pulled out his earbuds again. “Hey Brock.” Steve tossed his pencil down on the desk and scratched his temple. He didn’t get up. “What do you need?”

“Get your bifocals on Gramps. I need you for this Syrian thing. You missed the meeting with the transport group. I already sent you the briefing and the notes. And the presentation. The lists and the key code. And the maps-“

Steve interrupted him, “Actually, don't assume I’m going to be on that one.”

Brock looked at him with a smirk. “Oh really?”

Steve crossed his arms. “Yeah.”

“Who did you tell about this? Am I the only one who doesn’t know?” Brock didn’t actually look all that devastated. “You know mission’s in four days.”

“I know. I’m gonna pass on it.”

“Pass. On. It?” Brock said each word separately. He seemed to find all this funny.

“Yeah.”

“Okay Grandpa. Whatever you say.” Brock waggled the cell phone at him. “But you know this ain’t over yet.”

Steve looked over at him. He had come to find that his gaze, poker face and silent, put people off. They would talk to fill the silence. Change their positions in an argument. Give him what he wanted if he just said nothing. The trick rarely worked on Brock though.

Steve didn’t know what problem Brock had with him but he knew that nothing he ever did would change that. The hate just came of the guy in waves.

“You deserting?” Brock pointed with his cell phone hand at the paper on Steve’s desk.

“Not sure I’m even still in the service Brock.”

Brock shoved his phone in a cargo pants pocket and sat down across from him in the dinky visitor chair in Steve’s cube. Steve marvelled again at how tiny the desk furniture all looked when massive soldiers squeezed into the workspaces pretending to be office workers.

Steve picked back up his pencil to fiddle with. “And if I am, I’m thinking about retiring.”

Brock leaned forward and put his palms flat on the desk. “Retiring from what to what exactly?”

Natasha had always laughed about the binary nature of Brock’s blackness to Steve’s white. Right now, Brock was oozing menace sitting across from Steve in a work cubicle at the dark edge of an open concept workplace. Steve didn’t feel all that shiny and bright.

Brock cocked his head. “This place owns you. You’re not even supposed to be alive. I’ve seen the footage of you as the before as opposed to now as the after.” He tapped a thick finger on the desk, “Where you think you’re going to go? Has that Widow been filling your head with stories?”

Steve looked back at him. The idea of getting out had been an idea, just so much smoke, not firm in his mind. Looking at Brock right now, the feeling suddenly solidified in his mind into a concrete decision.

“I’m going to go to art school. I want to retire out.” Steve wasn’t sure where that first bit came from but it sounded right when he said it.

Brock laughed right in his face. He was laughing so hard he was spluttering. He slowly quieted and scrubbed at his big ugly face with his big ugly hand. “Okay Grandpa. I won’t miss you but I don’t think it will exactly be so easy as all that.” He slammed both hands down on the desk and pushed away from the space. “I’m still expecting you on mission in four days. I don’t give a shit if you know what you’re doing. Just show up and try not to fall out of the plane. Although if you die? That’s better for all of us.” He grinned at Steve. Well more like smirked with added teeth.

Steve thought Brock really wanted to punch him right now. He always looked like he wanted to punch Steve but right here in his cube it was very close to the surface. When Steve had first met Brock, Brock was always smacking the back of his head. Cuffing his shoulder hard with his knuckles. Putting him in a headlock.

Brock had stopped touching him after Steve laid down a beating on him that one time in the parking lot. Brock still had the little scar in his eyebrow from where Steve stepped on his head with a boot.  Now Steve kept it pretty impersonal at the office but Brock wasn’t that great at the charade.

Brock got a glint in his eye and before he left the cubicle, he leaned down towards Steve and stage whispered, “Maybe you will fall out of the plane buddy. Maybe this time your ticket gets punched for real.” He turned and left, clomping over to the elevators. Steve could tell he was really pissed as normally he moved soundlessly, always ready to surprise.

Such a drama queen. That’s what Natasha would say. His phone buzzed again. It was a text from her. Two words. “Mission. Go.”

Okay then. He put his earbuds back in again. “…All the things, That we've been through, You should understand me, Like I understand you.”

He took a sip of his now cold coffee and closed the text app on his phone. He got a legal pad out then reached for a pencil. He licked the pencil point and wrote ‘Syria Mission’ on the top of the paper in his best printing. Orders received.


End file.
